Secretive Birds: Privacy in Population Protocols

We study private computations in a system of tiny mobile agents. We consider the mobile population protocol model of Angluin et al. [2] and ask what can be computed without ever revealing any input to a curious adversary. We show that any computable predicate of the original population model can be made private through an obfuscation procedure that exploits the inherent non-determinism of the mobility pattern. In short, the idea is for every mobile agent to generate, besides its actual input value, a set of wrong input values to confuse the curious adversary. To converge to the correct result, the procedure has the agents eventually eliminate the wrong values; however, the moment when this happens is hidden from the adversary. This is achieved without jeopardizing the tiny nature of the agents: they still have very small storage size that is independent of the cardinality of the system. We present three variants of this obfuscation procedure that help compute respectively, remainder, t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: OPODIS
• Authors: Carole Delporte-Gallet, Hugues Fauconnier, Rachid Guerraoui, Eric Ruppert
• Keywords: Curious Adversary, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Mobile Agent, OPODIS 2007, Population Protocol Model